The daily and shamanic dimensions of the relationship with the subarctic land for the semi-nomadic Athapaskan speaking Nabesna people on the Alaska-Yukon border, as taught by the women, in 1970
p. 525-543
Résumés
While most descriptions of nomadic societies begin with a male perspective to which is added later the role of women, the present text enters the Nabesna semi- nomadic way of life as defined by the women, with the men involved as primary actors in hunting but not necessarily as primary producers of the cultured environment. The Nabesna women conjugate their role as creators and keepers of the human environment, including dwellings, clothing and food preservation with their participation in hunting, food gathering, and other pursuits that take them away from the camp or the village in the forest, often by themselves. These contacts mean they have to develop their relationship with the non-human environment not only as predators but also as full-fledged participants in the shamanic web of communication and influence.
Les dimensions quotidiennes et chamaniques des relations des Nabesnas, peuple athapaskan semi-nomade, avec le territoire subarctique, tel qu’enseignées par les femmes en 1970
Alors que la plupart des descriptions de peuples chasseurs nomades débutent selon une perspective masculine à laquelle on ajoute le point de vue des femmes, les circonstances de mon travail sur le terrain m’ont amenée à entrer dans le contexte culturel des Nabesnas tel que perçu et vécu par les femmes. Dans cette société de chasseurs subarctiques, les femmes passent encore autant de temps que les hommes en dehors et loin du village ou du campement ? elles chassent, pêchent, et récoltent une grande partie des ressources alimentaires et autres, souvent en groupes, parfois seules. Mais autrefois, la diversité de leurs tâches et l’ampleur de leur participation aux déplacements des camps de chasse leurs donnaient un accès privilégié d’abord au territoire, ensuite au maintien et à la création de l’environnement humain, c’est-à-dire culturel, enfin aux puissances animales ou invisibles qui tissaient la trame chamanique de l’univers.
Les Nabesnat’ani, ou Nabesnas, une dizaine de bandes ou groupes de familles, de deux cents à cinq cents personnes, selon les périodes, occupent les plateaux arrosés par les rivières Tanana et Nabesna au nord des monts Mentasta, Nutzotin et Chisana juste à l’ouest de la frontière du Yukon et de l’Alaska. Ils étaient encore, il y a moins d’un siècle, parmi les plus nomades des peuples athapaskans septentrionaux, en partie parce qu’ils n’avaient pas accès aux saumons comme les peuples des fleuves Yukon et Rivière du Cuivre. Ils dépendaient des migrations des caribous au printemps et à l’automne, et de la chasse au gros et au petit gibier (orignal et mouflon, ours noir et grizzly, castor, porc-épic et rat musqués ainsi que canards, oies et perdrix, entre autres) et de la pêche saisonnière, toutes ressources qui variaient d’un mois à l’autre et d’un endroit à l’autre. En dehors des retrouvailles des familles, durant les migrations des caribous que l’on piégeait dans des barrières en broussailles longues de plusieurs kilomètres, et sur les sites des grands campements près des barrages de pêche construits sur les goulets de certaines rivières, deux aménagements nécessitant la coopération d’une douzaines de familles étendues, (un maximum de 100 à 120 personnes) la plupart des bandes passaient le reste de l’années divisées en petits groupes de quelques familles nucléaires, parfois de quelques individus, qui se dispersaient dans le territoire et ne se retrouvaient que pour les fêtes du solstice d’hiver et pour les fêtes des morts ou « potlatch ». Il fallait faire des provisions pour l’hiver ; les deux derniers mois avant le printemps comptaient toujours parmi les plus durs pour les animaux comme pour les humains.
Le territoire n’avait ni frontière ni propriétaire exclusif. Mais chacun savait que la bande, ou le groupe de familles qui occupait le territoire avait un accès prioritaire à ses ressources. La composition des groupes variait d’une saison à l’autre. En dehors des liens parentaux, consanguins et affins, un système de clans matrilinéaires non localisés regroupés en moitiés exogames, structurait mariages et composition des groupes de travail et permettait d’étendre des liens quasi parentaux à tous les peuples voisins.
Durant mes visites, entre 1968 et 1972 les quelque 450 Nabesnas occupaient trois villages permanents: Tanacross, sur la rivière Tanana, Northways, près de la rivière Nabesna, et Tetlin, plus isolé, dont les 120 habitants dépendaient encore presque entièrement de la pêche, de la chasse et de la cueillette, et maintenaient avec l’environnement des relations forcément sédentaires mais encore modulées par les valeurs, les techniques et autres connaissances léguées par leurs parents et grands-parents.
Plusieurs impératifs structuraient autrefois la vie de la communauté, et donc des femmes ? d’abord il fallait s’assurer d’un abri (tente ou autre habitation) c’est à dire d’un camp, avec un feu, qui permettait la délimitation d’un environnement humain protégé, en particulier durant la nuit, contre les animaux, les fantômes et autres puissances invisibles; ensuite, le climat imposait un habillement chaud et efficace et donc une technologie du cuir ; surtout, pour assurer l’accès à la nourriture, il fallait déplacer le campement, de semaine en semaine sinon de jours en jours; mais on devait aussi prévoir les mois maigres, surtout ceux de la fin de l’hiver avec ses menaces de famine. Les femmes devaient d’abord composer avec ces impératifs, alors que les hommes se concentraient sur la chasse; ces impératifs dictaient les orientations de la technologie ? éléments légers et portables, ou fabriqués sur place pour un usage temporaire, comme les nasses à pêche en osier ou les appentis en branchage qui servaient de tente, ou la multitude des trappes et collets pour capturer le gibier. L’habillement, y compris la literie, dépendait du travail des peaux et des fourrures, ce qui nécessitait la fabrication des outils, couteaux, grattoirs, alènes etc. en pierre ou en os. Par ailleurs la préservation de la nourriture, des peaux et des autres ressources à conservation limitée, demandait des jours de préparation, filetage, découpage, séchage et fumage. Et c’est aux femmes qu’incombait le principal travail de boucherie. La plupart des activités féminines nécessitaient des excursions plus ou moins longues à l’extérieur du campement, tout près pour le bois de chauffage, la surveillance des nasses à poissons ou des collets pour les lièvres, mais jusqu’à dix ou quinze kilomètres et plus pour la chasse au gros gibier ou la relève des lignes de trappe (rats musqués). Les jeunes partaient dans le bois en groupe. Les femmes plus âgées voyageaient souvent seules ou avec une amie, un chien favori, ou l’un de leurs petits-enfants. En plus de la nourriture, il fallait du bois pour le feu, de l’écorce de bouleau (pour les paniers, les caches creusées dans le sol et les cabanes), des racines d’épinette, des branches d’osier, des galets pour faire bouillir la soupe, de la mousse pour calfeutrer les habitations, des sphaignes pour les couches, des piquants de porc-épic pour les broderies, et les plantes pour les teindre, entre autres matières utiles.
Aujourd’hui encore, qu’elle se déplace avec ou sans les hommes, une femme nabesna compétente se doit de connaître le territoire, ses sentiers et ses ruisseaux, de façon intime et précise. Mais il ne s’agit pas pour elle d’un lieu sauvage, encore moins d’un lieu domestiqué. Le paysage est la face visible d’un univers mental et onirique puissant et dangereux où se retrouvent et communiquent les uns avec les autres les animaux, petits et grands, les puissances visibles et invisibles, tout ce qui vit et donc tout ce qui pense et rêve, et jusqu’aux traces laissées par les pouvoirs primordiaux à l’origine du monde (dont les insectes). Et cet univers est à l’écoute. On rencontre les animaux individuellement, face à face. Les femmes enseignent à leurs enfants — et aux ethnographes — à surveiller leurs pensées, leurs émotions, leurs rêves, à l’affut de toute impression positive ou négative qui émanerait de l’univers animal, depuis la forêt qui se fait soudain silencieuse jusqu’à un souvenir fugitif d’un membre de la famille, et surtout les impressions corporelles qui servent de présage pour la chasse et autres événements.
Les rituels féminins (puberté, menstruations, grossesse et naissance), les séances chamaniques (ou rituels du rêve), les rituels de chasse, et même les rituels qui accompagnent la guerre, composent un seul grand complexe chamanique qui se partage les mêmes gestes, les mêmes positions corporelles, les mêmes interdictions rituelles, les mêmes objets et surtout le même vocabulaire. Ce complexe gère les relations avec le non-humain. On entre dans ce monde lorsqu’on part en forêt ou en montagne, lorsqu’on rêve, lorsqu’on tombe malade, et lorsqu’on est en contact avec la mort ou avec les nouveaux-nés, et pour les femmes lors de la puberté et des menstruations (périodes de pouvoir, et non pas d’impureté). Les pouvoirs, toujours individuels, acquis lors des rencontres oniriques, qu’il s’agisse de dons de guérisseurs, de chance à la chasse pour soi ou pour autrui, ou de protection contre les êtres malintentionnés, s’adressent aux femmes comme aux hommes. Mais alors que les hommes sont plus prompts à s’engager dans des démonstrations communautaires et parfois spectaculaires, et à entrer en compétition avec les autres «« rêveurs », les femmes ont tendance à dissimuler ou minimiser leurs dons pour n’attirer ni la jalousie de «« rêveurs » trop ambitieux, ni l’attention des puissances animales.
Le contact quotidien avec la forêt et ses habitants n’est ni innocent ni inoffensif. Il incombe aux humains et en particuliers aux femmes, non seulement de maintenir un certain modus vivendi avec les animaux et les plantes dont ils dépendent pour survivre, mais aussi de protéger et créer un espace humain restreint mais qui affirme la spécificité des êtres humains. C’est pourquoi la moralité porte autant sur le respect mutuel entre les personnes humaines ou animales que sur le soin avec lequel on va broder et perler les mocassins et les manteaux, nouer un filet de pêche avec des mailles régulières, ou composer un chant de bienvenue. Les femmes nabesnas avec qui j’ai travaillé considèrent comme un devoir moral la promotion des valeurs, connaissances et capacités humaines, selon le mode nabesna de faire les choses, qu’il s’agisse de culture matérielle ou de culture intellectuelle. Elles offrent comme modèles ces femmes qui par accident ou à la suite d’une attaque, se retrouvent seules dans les bois, sans outils ni matériel, mais se trouvent capable de recréer par elles-mêmes tout ce dont elles ont besoin, y compris des armes efficaces, des vêtements brodés, des réserves de nourriture, un campement maintenu avec élégance et qualité. Les animaux y trouvent leur compte car ils apprécient le travail bien fait et les décorations tout autant que les chants et les danses de la gent humaine.
Loin d’opposer un lieu domestique ou privé (village, campement ou habitation) à un lieu sauvage ou étranger, les Nabesnas, y compris les femmes, parcourent le dehors comme leur chez-soi, un chez-soi dangereux, immense mais qui a le mérite pour les hommes et plus encore pour les femmes d’être ouvert sur des relations interpersonnelles et affectives avec certains de ses habitants. Un impératif moral plus explicite pour les femmes que pour les hommes demeure encore aujourd’hui, plus de cinquante ans après la sédentarisation des bandes nabesnas autour des écoles anglaises et des églises chrétiennes, celui de maintenir un espace humain, déné, dans l’immensité d’un monde dont les humains sont loin d’être maîtres.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : chasseurs nomades, semi-nomade, subarctique, femmes, chamanisme, Athapaskan septentrionaux, Nabesna, Tanana supérieure
Keywords : nomadic hunters, semi-nomadism, subarctic, women, shamanism, Northern Athapaskan, Nabesna, Upper-Tanana
Texte intégral
Introduction
1Less than a century ago, the region defined by the valleys of the Nabesna River and the upper reaches of the Tanana River, just west of the Alaskan-Yukon border, were inhabited solely by small groups of hunter-gatherers. Their pursuit of game and other resources brought them through very diverse terrains, from the taiga forested hills, and the marshes and lakes of the Upper Tanana valley, to the high slopes of the Nutzotin and Mentasta mountain ranges announcing the still higher Wrangell-Saint Elias mountains in the south, and the Alaska range further west. Toward the east, the Chisana Hills and the headwaters of the White and Ladue rivers extended their range beyond the Canada-Alaska border. Toward the north, forested hills separated them from the Yukon drainage (figure 26.1). The Nabesnat’ani, or Nabesnas, for short, were among the most nomadic of the Northwestern Athapaskan peoples, or Déné in their own language, partly because they did not have access to the periodical and predictable salmon runs enjoyed by the groups living near the Copper and Yukon rivers and partly because they could not fish in the winter when the ice was too thick. They were subsisting on summer fishing (whitefish) and big game hunting (mostly caribou and moose, sometimes mountain sheep, black and grizzly bears), supplemented by hare, beaver, muskrat, marmot, and other small game such as porcupine and ground squirrels, and birds such as ducks, geese, grouse and ptarmigans. The pursuit of these fluctuating resources demanded a highly mobile lifestyle that conjugated gathering in relatively large numbers (up to 120 people at most) at the weirs of the fishing sites during fish spawning seasons and at the caribou fence sites during caribou migrations in the spring and fall for the communal caribou drives, with scattered small family groups hunting and trapping by themselves during the rest of the year. They would regroup only for the Winter Solstice celebrations and for the occasional communal feast for the dead, or “potlatches”, organized every few years when there was enough food to serve dozens of outside guests for several days of dancing and gift giving. Famine was always a risk in the winter, especially the last part of the season, a harsh and uncertain time for both human and animal beings, relieved by what was left of the food dried or frozen and cached during the year, and occasionally successful hunting expeditions. Food preservation was therefore an absolute necessity.
2The territory was neither owned nor delimited, everyone understood that the band, or group of families, occupying a region had first access to its resources. In one of the best discussions on the concept of “band” applied to the Northern Athapaskan, June Helm insists on the fact that Déné bands had no fixed membership, neither did task groups or hunting camps (Helm 2000: 10-25). In my own estimate, the Nabesnas (upper Tanana) people prior to the post contact epidemics numbered between 200 and 500 individuals and from five to ten bands, depending on the period, scattered on about twenty thousand square kilometers of taiga, marshes and dry mountain slopes (figure 26.2).
3In 1978, James W. Vanstone classified the pre-contact Upper Tanana-Nabesnas, and most other Northern Athapaskans, as Restricted Wandering communities (according to Richard Beardsley’s types of nomadic communities) defined as “wandering around within a territory that they define as theirs and defend against trespass [though they occasionally allow individuals or groups of outsiders in need to use the local resources, or to cross the land for trading; kin are always welcome.] Movement within the territory may be erratic or may follow a seasonal round, depending on the kind of wild food resources utilized (Beardsley cited by Vanstone 1974: 38)”. Last Tetlin band occupied a versatile semi-permanent site with a fish weir that could be visited many times during the year, so did Tetlin (figure 26.3); but Scottie Creek band did not have any permanent site and was on the move all year round, while Northway had small fish weirs (figure 26.4).
4From an outsider’s perspective, the Nabesna travels seemed indeed erratic and unpredictable, depending as they did on the weather and the motions of the game. Apart from the well-marked paths in dry land, some often-traveled canoe routes, and the use of landmarks in the much more accessible icy winter terrain, no formal network of permanent trail crisscrossed the landscape. But, from an insider’s perspective, travel was structured by the territorial knowledge held by the individuals: One could not erect a camp, cross a river or a swamp, or climb a mountain cliff just anywhere… or anytime. One could not know from one day to the next when and where the new campsite would have to be built, that depended on the game. But trips were planned in function of known possibilities. And knowledge was not only a question of concrete experience. Dreams and omen, as well as the divination rituals used by women to listen to the land, defined the best direction to take in the morning, and the likelihood of encountering game.
5The northern climatic conditions basically divided the year into two different sets of “moons”, that is two different landscapes, each with its own material culture, animal resources, social environment, transportation system and land maps. But the social structure framing individual interactions within and without the group remained the same, as did the worldview and the basic principles governing the relations with the natural or non-human environment. Each band was built on consanguineal and affinal kin ties, and was practically self-sufficient economically, though linked to the others for social exchanges, funeral feasts, and trade of status enhancing luxury items for the leading families. Affinal ties and trade partnership opened access to neighbouring territories and their resources. The social structure had to accommodate an egalitarian but extremely individualistic people who valued their self-sufficiency and their privacy. Together with the fluid membership of the groups, this placed a check on the more ambitious and larger families who, in some bands, took a temporary lead to control the best fishing and hunting sites. For the kinship theoreticians of the mid twentieth century, George Peter Murdock among others, such a lifestyle could only lead to patrilocal post-nuptial residence and therefore bilateral or patrilineal social organizations, since, being the main providers, hunting men needed to develop a precise knowledge of the territory and to form strong bonds with other men (Murdock 1949: 205; Murdock 1955: 55). Yet, the Nabesnas and all their neighbours maintained for centuries a matrilineal kinship system with non-localized but named exogamous clans and moieties (De Laguna 1975). This system extended quasi-kinship ties with all surrounding people. Robert McKennan had spent some time with them in 1929-30 and described a series of communities only partly sedentarized, with an operating clan and moiety system. That system was still in place when I visited the Nabesna people between 1968 and 1972, where it structured the feast or potlatch invitations (figure 26.5).
6When encountered by the first white explorer Lt Allen, in 1885, the Nabesnas counted six non localized bands, numbering about 190 people in total, a third of them children. They had just been hard hit by several epidemics. Almost a century later, in the 1960-1970 period, the Nabesna-Upper Tanana area people were divided between three main permanent villages (completed by a dozen former camp sites still occupied by a few families): Tanacross, on the Tanana River; Northways, near the Nabesna River and linked by road to the Alaska Highway; and Tetlin on the Tetlin River, an affluent of the Tanana. Out of a total Nabesna population of about 450 individuals, the 120 inhabitants of Tetlin were still depending on hunting and gathering for the bulk of their food, only two or three generations away from the semi-nomadic groups that ranged over the area (Guédon 1974: 8), and two generations away from full sedentarization, oil and pipeline industry, highway work and internet.
7My research methodologies grew around particular circumstances. Trained by Frederica de Laguna in her precise ethnographical methods, I entered the Tetlin community in the spring of 1969. Because I struggled with the local language and did not know their manners, the local women decided that I needed to be rapidly educated in order for myself to survive, and (as I discovered later) for the community to keep intact its relationship with the land. I found myself willingly assuming the role of a child, or more precisely, the role of a girl just reaching puberty. While most descriptions of nomadic societies begin with a male perspective, to which is later added the role of women, one could in this context at least start with entering this culture as lived and defined by the women, with the men involved as primary actors in some activities but not necessarily as primary producers of the cultured environment. The term domesticity does not make sense for Nabesna women who still spend a great deal of time outdoors, out of the village and in the forest, and often by themselves, to hunt, fish or gather a large proportion of the resources needed to feed and clothe their families (Guédon 2016).
The land
8One cannot describe the Athapaskan-speaking people hunting-gathering way of life without a foray into the local language. For instance, the term “nen” means both the land and the process of maintaining one’s relationship with the land: Like most Athapaskan lands, the Nabesna geographical environment is best seen as the surface of a vaster sentient universe that contains the animals and their minds, the dead and the unborn beings, and hosts of visible and invisible powers existing in a world that could be defined as a community of minds, “ni, or ini”. The Athapaskan term “déné” (“t’ani” in Nabesna) which designates “human beings or person” also applies to animal persons, to fish and bird persons, to trees and berry bush persons, even to butterflies and mosquitoes persons. “Everybody alive is a person. Every person has a mind”.
9The annual cycle of travel through the land does not imply a ceremonial boundary between the warm and the cold seasons. Neither does one speak of it as a cycle. Rather, it is viewed as a pulsing motion, akin to the daily goings and comings from and to camp, the gathering of a band for large game drives and the dispersion of the families into the bush, or the camp being installed, lived in, and packed up for the next move. The same process also governs waking up, moving throughout the day, and falling asleep for the night, then coming back to one self during sleep; or being born to living a life, short or long, and dying, then coming back to oneself during death. But if one walks far enough in the woods, one will find oneself in the land of the dead, and if one can manage to go even further, one will find oneself back among the living. Both sides of reality are really one dimension of universe. Anything static is dead by definition; the ultimate ground of being is dynamic, moving and changing (Pinxten et al. 1983: 37, 161-162; Guédon 2005: 100-103)
10Among Athapaskan speakers, there are no words for border: space is defined by its central features, and the range of the motions it allows, not by boundaries. It expends or contracts according to use and circumstances (see Pinxten et al.1989, for the same principle among the Navajos; and Brody 1981, for the Beaver Athapaskan people in British Columbia.) And since the Athapaskan languages use the same terms (“yeets, or yiits or yo” in Nabesna) to speak of space, wind and weather or sky, and to speak of consciousness, awareness or mental moods, space is aware, and consciousness is space in motion. The resulting conceptions clash with the European and White American’s principles of fixed maps, crossing boundary procedures, hunting rights and land ownership; but they allow deep forays into the country’s far reaches: when Lieutenant Allen arrived in Tetlin in 1885, he found men who could describe to him the shortest route by foot or by portage from Tetlin to Fort Reliance, near what is now Dawson city, Yukon, in Han territory (Guédon 1974: 10-11), and children who had visited Fort Yukon on the Yukon River.
11Apart from trading and visiting, moving across the territory is tied primarily to the pursuit of seasonal food supplies. The land is ever changing. Every species follows its own cycles, abundant some years, absent the next. When hares are plentiful, in a nine years’ cycle, lynxes and foxes also appear. Fish spawning follows its own beat. Migratory birds arrive with the ice melting. And caribou migrations define the two main hunting seasons. Every band, every campsite has its own specific environment with a corresponding set of resources; its own yearly rounds often demand access to a territory occupied by another band for certain supplies. The hills are good for caribou and ptarmigan, not for fishing; marshes offer fishing as well as beavers, muskrats and waterfowls; marmots and mountain sheep inhabit the mountain slopes. All resources fluctuate from season to season. Every year presents a different time line. And human beings walk the land in keeping with all these rhythms (Guédon 1974: 34-63).
Moving though the land: a woman’s world
12A camp is usually composed of two or more extended families who have agreed to travel and hunt together. Adult men’s business is simple: they go ahead, by themselves or in small groups, and they hunt; or sometimes they go on trading trips, or on raiding expeditions; encountering an enemy raid is always a possibility and the camps have to be protected (McClellan 1975). Men travel fast and are equipped to kill. Women travels cover a wide variety of tasks, and come in many different forms: First, in keeping with the seasonal changes on an annual dimension, the camps have to move from one ground to the next. Summer camps may consist of simple lean-to made of brush and built anew at every move, or consist of skin tents. A camp on the move translates into women and anyone available to help, packing, transporting and then unpacking the camp material and personnel. When the family is on the move, men leave ahead, in small groups, to break the trail in winter and to hunt by themselves. The women then organize the packing and transportation of the camp to a site agreed beforehand. The loads include the tent or the material needed to build a dwelling, the bedding material, the clothing material, the skins and fur, the tools needed daily, such as needles and awls, knives and cutting stones, skin stone scrapers, cooking containers (such as birch bark containers sewn tightly enough to contain water to which are added stones heated in a fire), food needed for a few days, in case one does not kill something on the way, some live coals (carried inside hollowed burrs or bark baskets —or birch fungus and fire drill), all manufactured by women. One discards or caches anything that can be found elsewhere or made anew— One does not carry objects if one can carry knowledge (see Ridington 1982). On top of the load, one adds the puppies and the small children. With the packs on their back, the women then leave for the next site. In the summer time, one could sometimes use a canoe. Most of the time, the women walk. Packing dogs, intelligent animals with experience and stamina, share part of the burden with bags or baskets slung across their back. Distances are estimated in terms of time spent on the trails. The camp keeps moving from day to day until some big game is killed or enough food has been gathered (A moose requires seven or eight days to process on site; a caribou means about five day in the same place.)
13In the winter, when the mosquitoes and other insects are gone, together with a whole host of bad spirits, ghosts, and other invisible beings, the frozen grounds allow for easier travel, weather permitting. But intense cold and powerful storms, as well as the much longer nights, mean the dwellings must accommodate extended families for several days, if not weeks in a row. Women keep the dwellings covered with bark and sturdy moose or caribou skins, and bank the tent with snow. Some sites allow the construction of a sturdier winter house, partially dug in the ground, with a bent wood frame covered with moss and bark (McKennan 1959; see also Heine et al. 2001: 51-65). When the snow is right, the goods can be rolled into the larger moose or caribou skins that are used as cover for the winter tents, and be pulled as sleds on the snow. Tent poles are likely to be obtained from the new site. The men leave early, on their snowshoes, carrying only their weapon. Later the children are sent ahead on the men’s tracks, with small packs, walking more slowly and playing along the way. Women go on sorting and packing the camp and leave last, overtaking the children before reaching the new site. There they light the fire, sort the food, check the clothing and the footwear, erect the tents, unroll the bedding and so on. Before the coming of tea, cups of hot meat soup, and strips of dry meat or fish, would mark the pauses.
14While men hunt in small teams for days at a time, or work on their weapons and tools, older women also gather food closer to home, snare winter game such as hare and ptarmigan, beaver and muskrats, go ice-fishing with spears or traps, and more recently nets, until the ice becomes too thick, and keep their family warm and fed; younger women may accompany the hunting teams, their husbands or in-law. Winter is also prime time for sewing clothes (with thread made of sinew). In all seasons, whenever the men killed some big game away from camp or village, women and older children retraced the hunters’ tracks to find the kill site. Women do most of the butchering, men only the most urgent cutting. Women would skin and cut the meat, pack most of it home, and cache the rest to be picked up later, or camp on the spot if needed to process it or cache it in pits close to the permafrost, or in winter, freeze it and cover it. Hare, muskrat, even ducks are dried and cached. Caches would be visited during the tough late winter period when all non-migrating animals are either hibernating or too lean to eat. Preserving food, including fat, took as much effort as obtaining it, and is just as essential. This becomes an all-time consuming task when dealing with fish that has to be cut and dried or smoked immediately (Guédon 2005: 167-170). Whenever food is needed, women also go hunting big game or small game, alone, or with a partner.
15The only restrictions are ritual ones: Women cannot hunt bears, grizzly or black, nor hunt while they are menstruating (Guédon 2016). Only men could go to war. Girls who have just reached puberty and menstruating women are required to walk by themselves a certain distance from the trail, through the bush; this is slow going, even more in winter when one has to break the trail afresh in the snow. Menstrual blood is not impure, but is powerful and dangerous in the shamanic sense of the term. Newborn babies are also preferably kept indoor or out of the way.
16All year long, some tasks require daylong sessions of strenuous work indoors or within the limits of the camp. Scraping and tanning moose or caribou skin, maintaining smoke fires, cutting strips of meat for drying, preparing willow strip, birch bark and spruce bark and root for basketry, netting snow shoes, preparing and dyeing porcupine quills (later replaced by beads) for embroidering clothing and bags, cutting rabbit skins in narrow strips for hand knitted blankets and kids winter outfits. In the larger fishing site gatherings, everybody, men and women, participate in the fishing. The women fillet, cut and dry the fish. Similarly, everyone is involved in the construction of the caribou fences, the making of the caribou snares with babiche (rawhide), and the drives themselves (Guédon 1974: 34-63; see also Heine et al. 2001: 141-153). Women prefer working on meat, fish and hide in the camp, and make the tools they use, from stone scrapers and knives to awls etc. (figure 26.6). For archaeologists, this means that stone tools, such as scrapers, knives, files, hide rougheners and other lithic material found on camp sites are more likely to have been made by and owned by women (Brumbach & Jarvenpa 2006: 12-13).
17Genders are not defined by opposition to each other, and they matter for women only during their fertile years. Also, the Athapaskan reincarnation principle allows one to be reborn either as a boy or as a girl. The gendered division of task is not as rigid as it looks at a first glance. Men may join a women’s group. Women do join men’s hunting groups. Once past menopause, women will hunt big game and travel as fast as the men, in groups or alone, though they still keep an eye on the grandchildren —a grandmother will take her grand daughter hunting with her, teach her to paddle a canoe or to set a trap, and will transmit to her the secret location of special blueberry or raspberry patches (See Brumbach & Jarvenpa 2006: 200-215 for the same habits among the Chipewyan people). Fathers are closer to their children, including daughters, than mothers and mother’s brothers who are the disciplinarians. Men, as they get older, join the women in their concern for the daily care of the community. Several women have told me proudly that they have taught their sons basic women skills, such as cutting skins and sewing. Finally, men and women do hunt together, either in groups or by themselves as husband and wife (figure 26.7). This teamwork is facilitated by the fact that husband and wife belong to opposite clans, that is, to opposite moieties, and stand in an equal-to-equal joking relationship. “We marry the people with whom we can joke, and fight, and talk, our cross-cousins,” say the Nabesnas, who also maintain: “Your best hunting partner is a cross-cousin, or in-law, a friend”. Brothers, like sisters, are tied in a hierarchical relationship with the eldest entitled to obedience and respect from the youngest; it is a supportive but not very comfortable relationship. The wife-husband partnership is also strengthened by the active and frequent capacity of the wife to communicate with the animal powers through divination rituals aimed at localizing the game for her husband (Guédon 2018: 212-213).
18But the Nabesna women, moving with or without the men, get to know the land intimately and precisely, not as a blank wilderness, but as a wide open home with the inhabitants of which they create personal ties. They adjust their trajectories accordingly and in turn teach the younger ones: here a stone circle facilitating a fire, there a shallow creek easier to cross, here a set of muskrat huts, there a large stone table, below a stand of willows good for fish traps, there a lake when someone died a long time ago when a giant fish jumped out of the water, here an abandoned fish weir, and over there an open space to watch for animals or just to feel good while watching the wide horizon: “Isn’t my country a beautiful one!”
Dream land: a shamanic world
19Unless they intend to engage in dream or vision quests, in which case they have to divest themselves of all weapons and fresh meat, fish or fruit, men and women enter the woods as predators. As among the wolves, foxes or bears, among others, this identity is fully assumed by human beings. Their family’s survival is at stake and they do not apologize to the animals for hunting them. But one must respect a common etiquette. One is not supposed to think about death, wounds, blood, anger or unpleasant things while hunting, animals hear human thoughts. One should never leave a wounded animal behind; the obligation to go after it or after a young left motherless is imperative. Cleanliness has to be observed. And all parts of the game have to be eaten or disposed of so a to justify the killing. The primary injunction is to respect the nonhuman people (domestication of animals and private ownership of land are still sins, at least among the older Athapaskan-speaking people. Dogs are not really exceptions since they are defined as partly human.)
20All animals are encountered individually, person-to-person. In spite of the frequent references in the literature, including the ethnological literature, to “animal spirits”, there are no terms or expression in Nabesna (or any other Northern Athapaskan language) that could be translated in this way. Instead, people speak about “the animal that is being dreamed about” when in a shamanistic ritual context, or simply about this or that animal person. There is no archetypal figure, nor animal spiritual master. Animals, like all other figures or persons encountered physically or in dreams, and like human beings, do not symbolize anything: They are who they are, each unique, and each animated by its own intent and awareness, each living somewhere on the land. Unlike human beings, animals are powerful and knowledgeable, and linked mind to mind with the other members of their species, sometimes with the environment, or with the land itself. Nature cannot be said to be nice, animals are not necessarily friendly, but they can enter our dreams and share our needs (Martin 2016: 182-193). Before a blueberry picking expedition, one of the older women made a point of instructing me verbally: “Marie, when you go in the bush, when you come with us, be quiet in your mind, think good thought. Animals hear us; they hear your thought. Do not think about game, do not think about the big one [bear]. Think good thought. Then we will be lucky” (Guédon 2005: 160).
21Dreaming is the primary method for shamanic processes (The term “dreaming” also refers to daydreaming, visions, hunches, impressions and bodily feelings). Those people, men or women, who are known as “dreamers, or sleep doctor” (that is, shaman) have the capacity to enter dreaming consciously at will. But everyone who can dream is “a little bit a ‘sleep doctor’”, including white ethnographers, dogs and caribou, and most everything endowed with a mind, that is everything that is alive. The land itself is poised between the awake reality and the dreaming, bringing power to whomever enters inside its soil, like bears, mice or marmots, or is close to the ground, like blueberry bushes. As a wanderer on the land, one meets cautiously a large community of non-human persons or souls not always welcoming, but sometimes curious and eager to communicate. (The traditional Nabesna worldview does not mention the Mother Earth theme. When the pubescent girl begins her months long retreat in a hut in the woods, or in a hole at the back of the winter house, she is brought into contact with the powers of the land, not with a nurturing mother figure).
22The female rituals (for puberty, pregnancy, birth and menstruation) are not set apart from other categories of rituals. The hunting rituals I had at first assigned to men, the shamanic practices, which I also thought at first mostly males, the puberty rituals, and the war rituals all used the same retreat away from society, the same ritual gestures, including the positioning of the body and ritual avoidances, the same paraphernalia, and the same goals (Guédon 2005: 162-175). When I began using the Athapaskan vocabulary to describes the rituals in question, their unity became obvious: If the same terms describe a dreamer’s quest, a hunter calling the game, a puberty girl in her hut, and the death preparations for an old woman, it is because all these rituals are part of a single complex. The hunter preparing for the hunt is in the same position as the menstruating woman isolating herself away from the community. They are both facing the non-human space and its transforming knowledge.
23If both women and men can grow into powerful dreamers (shamans) and be recognized as healers interesting differences between the two genders emerge in the myths and traditional stories as well as in daily practices. Famous male dreamers are often involved in shaman’s fights or power contests that may even endanger their families and communities as the conflict escalates into retaliation against kin, or when the use of ill-controlled powers backfires against their users. Only rarely do we hear about contests between women. Men are more likely to use their contact with their animal tutelaries to reach their own goals, mostly luck at hunting or gaming, and prognostics concerning expeditions. Women also have at their disposal a wide array of bodily signals, warning signs and clairvoyant abilities to assess and feel the natural environment as well as the well-being of kin. Significantly, they hide their gifts and, when mentioning them, minimize the scale of their intervention so as not to attract the attention of more competitive, usually male, dreamers, or of the animals (something all dreamers are supposed to do).
24Hunting is one aspect of the larger shamanic complex where men’s and women’s approaches differ. Hunting men can think metaphorically of the game they pursue in terms recalling the seduction and conquest of women: dreaming about sex is a good omen, and the wife staying at the camp is linked in the dream space to her husband’s intended game. Women do not take hunting or food gathering as a sexual metaphor. Dreaming about heavy loads to carry back home is a better omen for a woman hunting big game. Women are also more likely to engage in dialogue with the animals: “Grandfather, Grandmother, I am just a poor woman, I need to feed the children. Please be on your way”. They may empathize, for instance with a cow moose followed by her calf: “Teetcu, poor mother, I don’t kill a cow in front of her kid… nor a calf in front of its mother”. If men sometimes think of killing game as a display of power, women prefer thinking of hunting as a gift.
To become human
25In 1970, the old habits were still strong: women still spent most of everyday outside, and were eager to transmit their world to the next generation. Throughout their stories and their comments, a theme repeatedly surfaces: It is not enough to survive, one must survive as a human being, as a Déné. It is not enough to find food and fire, on must maintain a proper human space. Confronted with the all-encompassing vastness of the non-human world, one has to face the responsibility of maintaining the small islands of humanity, to insure a way to be human (figure 26.8). From embroidered moccasins to well-smoked fish, from regular stitches to precise snowshoe lacing, from beautifully designed coats to imaginative poetry and songs, human culture (“déné ways”), while not too different in its essence from bears’ ways or from wolves’ ways, is worth saving and enhancing, if only for the sake of the human community (figure 26.9). But it seems to be also for the sake of the relationship with the land. Animals, and game animals in particular, enjoy the precision and the beauty of well-crafted tools and weapons. They frown on hunters running on badly netted snowshoes, with dirty bows, or poorly made knives. And they find pleasure in human songs. But they do not like blurred identities.
26For human beings, the primary consideration, the first need, is for shelter. The human space, whether village, camp, or tent or even a simple lean-to equipped with a fire, is the only place where one finds protection against unwanted contacts with non-human beings. And protection is needed especially during the night. Walls of brush, skin, or canvas prevent the physical or mental intrusion of the non-human world. Fire and light provide additional protection. The specifically human habit of using clothes adds another layer of protection, the more so when clothes are humanized by embroidery, porcupine quilling or beaded decorations, or just with careful stitching and the quality of the tanning. In the tales relating the return of the hero or heroine back from the animal or dream world, the first necessary gesture is to dress him, or her, with a human-made coat. At the end of her months-long puberty retreat, and in order to welcome the girl back to humanity, she is bathed and then ritually dressed.
27Men hunt mentally powerful animals, and are in daily contact with their space, from which they have to come back. Women understand —and teach explicitly their daughters— that they are the prime producers of the human environment, needed by men and by the whole community to protect their “humanness”. I was told many times the stories of these “prize women” lost in the woods, or escaping an enemy attack with nothing but the clothes on their back, managing by themselves to manufacture the tools, the weapons, the material needed to reconstruct their whole human environment, and to do so with elegance and quality (Slobodin 1975: 293-298; Hearne 1958 [1795]: 168-172). For women, self-sufficiency is necessary, competence is a moral duty, and creativity is a virtue.
28This moral duty to preserve and enhance the human aspects of the world applies equally to the dream side. Julie Cruikshank (1979, 1998) has shown that among the Nabesnas’ Indigenous neighbours in the Yukon, both men and women relate stories of encounters with the non-human world. But men are more willing to risk their lives and their humanity in their search for shamanic powers valued for themselves, while women prefer not to go so far into the other side that they cannot come back to their community. From the women’s and the elders’ perspective, shamanic powers and paranormal gifts are useless unless they can be shared and used for the sake of the human community.
Conclusions
29When George Peter Murdock summarized the quasi consensus of his days by stating that the hunting-gathering way of life was incompatible with matrilineal kinship systems, because men, the major providers, needed to be thoroughly familiar with the environment, he and his colleagues were aware neither of the contribution brought by women to the food supply nor of their role in maintaining the human cultural environment; and they could not appreciate the need for women to know the land as thoroughly as the men, even less the familiarity of the relationship between the women and the shamanic aspects of the world. Some half a century after the end of the old nomadic annual cycle, the Nabesna women still demonstrated that they, as much as the male hunters, were participating in this knowledge and familiarity. The survival of their families, especially when hunting in small groups scattered on the land, used to depends on the quality of their connection with the land and its non-human inhabitant. It also depended on their transmitting that knowledge to children, and first of all to their daughters and grand daughters. Matrilineality and matrilocality made sense here. Similarly, by focusing on the men’s difficult interactions with the game animals through the use of shamanic powers, one could miss the intensity and steady interaction of women with the same shamanic powers emanating from the land at large, but accessed with less competitiveness and a patient intimacy (Guédon 2016).
30In the past, while moving throughout the land, women had to attend to minute details of the landscape in order to access a wide variety of resources. Yet the land was not just a question of resource location, social interactions and geographical lay out. For women as for men, the shamanistic dimensions of the earth were part of the daily routine and they had to stay attuned to their manifestation. Far from restricting the women’s reach for interactions with their kin and with the non-human beings, the nomadic life style allowed a steadily increasing blending of human daily life and contact with the non-human world. If women and older men are less inclined than the younger male hunters to pit themselves against the animals’ powers and more prompt to talk to the animals and negotiate a safe passage for themselves and the children, less intent on power games and more interested in exchange of services or mutual recognition, they gain a rich set of intimate and emotional connections with the animal and the other beings they meet on their way. The land they travel is home, but it is a home satisfyingly open on other lives.
Auteur
Anthropologist, Adjunct professor (Religious Studies) at the University of Ottawa & Research Director at INTERC, (International Network for Training, Education and Research on Culture - Département d’études anciennes et de sciences des religions, Université d'Ottawa 75 Laurier Ave E, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N5 (Canada)
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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