Where the scientists roam: Ecology, management and bison in Northern Canada

Journal of Canadian Studies, Summer 2002 by Sandlos, John

This essay explores the historical role that scientists have played in the debates over bison management in Wood Buffalo National Park. It questions the philosophical assumption that science is inherently tied to the control and management of nature by state and economic actors. The paper closely examines four distinct periods in the history of wildlife science in the park to argue that zoologists, ecologists and veterinarians have played diverse and contradictory roles in the debates over northern bison management. Though the historical record reveals many examples of scientists who accepted an intensive managerial approach to bison conservation, many other wildlife scientists working in Wood Buffalo National Park have, in fact, resisted the utilitarian and productionist emphasis that has been promoted by administrators working within the Canadian government. The paper concludes that the practice of wildlife ecology in Wood Buffalo Park has been a diverse and heterogeneous endeavour reflecting different disciplinary, institutional and ideological divisions within the field.

Dans cet article, l'auteur examine le role historique que les scientifiques ont joue dans les relatifs a la gestion des populations de bison dans le Parc national Wood Buffalo. Il remet en question l'hypothese philosophique voulant que la science soit en soi liee au controle et a la gestion de la nature par des acteurs economiques et politiques. Il examine attentivement quatre periodes distinctes de l'histoire de la science de la faune dans le parc pour soutenir que les zoologistes, les ecologistes et les veterinaires ont joue des roles distincts et contradictoires dans les debats au sujet de la gestion des populations du bison du nord. Meme s'il existe plusieurs exemples de scientifiques qui ont accepte d'adopter une approche gestionnaire intensive pour la conservation du bison, il y a aussi des preuves que plusieurs autres scientifiques de la faune travaillant dans le Parc national Wood Buffalo ont resiste a l'approche utilitaire et productionniste promue par les administrateurs du gouvernement canadien. L'auteur conclut que la pratique de l'ecologie de la faune dans le Parc national Wood Buffalo a ete une entreprise diverse et heterogene qui montre qu'il existe diverses tendances disciplinaires, institutionnelles et ideologiques dans ce domaine de recherche.

On 3 October 1893, Royal Northwest Mounted Police Commissioner L.W. Herchmer wrote urgently to the Comptroller in Ottawa that, "I have the honour of drawing to the attention of the Department the imminent danger of the total extermination of the small band of wood bison, at present ranging in the country in the vicinity of Great Slave Lake."1 Herchmer's immediate concern was the reports he had received of deep snow during the last winter, which had allowed Native hunters easy access to the wood bison and precipitated a decline in the populations to an estimated total of 150 animals, but his correspondence marked the beginning of a series of debates concerning the condition and fate of this last free-roaming herd of bison in Canada. The debate has continued to the present day. Herchmer's letter, combined with reports of a steep decline in the wood bison that had appeared in the popular writings of famous hunter-naturalists such as Caspar Whitney and Warburton Pike, prompted the Dominion government to enact a closed season on buffalo through the Unorganized Territories Game Preservation Act of 1894. In 1897, the federal government established a North West Mounted Police detachment in Fort Smith to enforce the restrictions on buffalo hunting, and the first two convictions against Native hunters for game offenses were successfully prosecuted in 1898.2

To assess the effectiveness of the new game laws, the government made its first tentative steps to gather scientific information about the northern bison from the formal and popular reports of geologists, amateur naturalists, police officers and zoologists. Most notably, the three journeys of Major A.M. Jarvis, RNWMP, the American naturalist E.A. Preble and the famous author-naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton to the Salt River and Little Buffalo River regions in 1907 produced an estimate of 300 animals, a number that was widely circulated in Seton's popular travelogue The Arctic Prairies (1911). A ground survey of the buffalo range by the zoologist Francis Harper in 1914 produced an estimate of 500 bison, and the geologist Charles Camsell calculated a total herd of 300 bison in 1916 during expeditions conducted under the auspices of the Canadian Geological Survey. These early naturalists never acknowledged the absurdity of attempting to estimate buffalo numbers based on a few short excursions into a huge range that included thousands of square kilometers of forest cover and wetlands. None the less, they used their suspect assumption that the northern bison herds were in decline - for the most part due to Native hunting, according to Jarvis and Seton - as a justification for establishing a more active federal wildlife administration in the Northwest Territories.3 The Forestry Branch of the Department of the Interior, for example, took responsibility for the wildlife in dominion forests in 1911 and established a regular game warden service operating out of Fort Smith. One year later, Maxwell Graham, who was Chief of the Parks Branch's Animal Division, began a bureaucratic campaign for a large bison preserve in the Slave-Athabasca region that resulted in the creation of Wood Buffalo National Park in 1922. The practice of wildlife "science" had for the first time identified a wildlife crisis in northern Canada, and the state had responded by creating a preserve for the threatened animals."