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Playing
With Fish And Other Lessons from the North
by Robert J. Wolfe
University of Arizona Press, 2006.
In this thoughtful collection
of personal essays, a cultural anthropologist contrasts his
studies of Alaska's indigenous peoples with his suburban California
homeland and draws insights from the juxtaposition about how
sustainable relationships between people and nature can be formed.
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Among the Yup'ik Eskimo of
Alaska, whose traditional hunting and fishing practices the author
documented, there is a saying, "The fish are not to beplayed with."
This instruction is ingrained in Yup'ik culture and impressed upon its
children from a young age. "The teaching touches on correct ways of
perceiving nature. It describes how humans may find rightful places
within it," the author explains. |
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I
remember my first bear encounter in California -- like meeting the
grizzlies in Alaska -- a memorable event. I was walking a dirt road
going nowhere in particular when I stopped to look at a moving trashcan
with a hairy bottom. The bear's head came out of the can. He looked me
in the eyes. Immediately, someone picked me up by my armpits,
running... I was delivered into my own mother's arms at a campsite. I
believe bears are my earliest memory, the moment I became me.
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Robert
J. Wolfe, formerly a research director with the Alaska Department of
Fish and Game and a first-time author with this book, describes how
this traditional view of nature conflicted with the catch-and-release
sportfishing community in southwest Alaska. |
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"Many sport
fishing professionals believe their sport to be unmatched. For them,
the sport in its purest form is unquestionably beneficial, both to
people and to fish. This is a basic tenet of faith," he explains. When
Yup'ik elders challenged their viewpoint, pointing out that
catch-and-release was a violation of their sacred trust with nature and
that sport fishing was making subsistence fishing more difficult, it
was "disorienting, gut-wrenching, and psychologically threatening.
There's an initial rush to righteous anger. Then the challenge is
dismissed as self-serving politics or simple ignorance. For the
faithful, it's heresy to consider it an authentic possibility."
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| Bird migrations are wondrous. How is
it that birds successfully traverse vast distances year after
year with such diminutive heads? The largest are the size of
tightly-rolled socks, shiny eyes poked pinlike to the sides. I
understand what scientists assert -- birds successfully navigate the
vast distances by memory. Birds remember landmarks, star constellations
rotating in the black heavens, and slight realignments of the Earth's
electromagnetic fields sense with intracranial lodestones. This all
occurs within the rolled-up sock. As I say, it's wondrous. |
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The
catch-and-release conflict between the Yup'ik and the sport fishers is
not resolved, and its story is just one of eight essays in this volume,
all of them bound together by the common theme of conflicting cultures
at odds over their relationships natural world. |
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