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Producing Predators: Wolves, Work, and Conquest in the Northern Rockies
In Producing Predators Michael D. Wise argues that contestations between Native and non-Native people over hunting, labor, and the livestock industry drove the development of predator eradication programs in Montana and Alberta from the 1880s onward. The history of these antipredator programs was significant not only for their ecological effects but also for their enduring cultural legacies of colonialism in the Northern Rockies.
By targeting wolves and other wild carnivores for extermination, cattle ranchers disavowed the predatory labor of raising domestic animals for slaughter, representing it instead as productive work. Meanwhile, federal agencies sought to purge the Blackfoot, Salish-Kootenai, and other indigenous peoples of their so-called predatory behaviors through campaigns of assimilation and citizenship that forcefully privatized tribal land and criminalized hunting and its related ritual practices. Despite these colonial pressures, Native communities resisted and negotiated the terms of their dispossession by representing their own patterns of work, food, and livelihood as productive.
By exploring predation and production as fluid cultural logics for valuing labor rather than just a set of biological processes, Producing Predators offers a new perspective on the history of the American West and the modern history of colonialism more broadly.
By targeting wolves and other wild carnivores for extermination, cattle ranchers disavowed the predatory labor of raising domestic animals for slaughter, representing it instead as productive work. Meanwhile, federal agencies sought to purge the Blackfoot, Salish-Kootenai, and other indigenous peoples of their so-called predatory behaviors through campaigns of assimilation and citizenship that forcefully privatized tribal land and criminalized hunting and its related ritual practices. Despite these colonial pressures, Native communities resisted and negotiated the terms of their dispossession by representing their own patterns of work, food, and livelihood as productive.
By exploring predation and production as fluid cultural logics for valuing labor rather than just a set of biological processes, Producing Predators offers a new perspective on the history of the American West and the modern history of colonialism more broadly.
210 pages, Paperback
Published November 1, 2020
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January 17, 2020
From the 1860s through the 1930s, ecologies—both natural and human—fundamentally changed on the northern Great Plains of Montana in the United States and adjacent southern Alberta in Canada. Author Michael Wise argues that European-American colonization of the Great Plains shifted ecosystems that for millennia had been dominated by predation into a new configuration that emphasized carefully and ruthlessly manipulated production. In this evolution, traditional “predators” (fur trappers, indigenous peoples, and native carnivores) were supplanted by “producers” (dryland farmers, ranchers, and tourists). In reality, of course, the producers were just as predatory as the indigenous peoples and the carnivores; they simply substituted cattle and sheep for native ungulates and agricultural commodities for prairie grasses. In addition, they formulated and promoted a world view that actively dissociated production from predation, which allowed them to rationalize brutal colonization of native peoples, the slaughter of bison and other native ungulates, and the extermination of predators. In the process, the enlightened ranchers and farmers efforts’ inadvertently ended up “producing predators”: fur trappers, market hunters, wolves, cattle rustlers, unscrupulous land speculators, whiskey purveyors, and wolf hunters. The ostensible cultural and ecological shift from condemnation of predation to glorification of domestic production in the northern Great Plains and its far-reaching and persistent effects is the subject of Wise’s monograph.
As he explains in his acknowledgements in the preface, Wise initially conceived of this book at an environmental history workshop jointly sponsored by Montana State University and the University of Wisconsin in 2007. Wise went on to develop the concept into his doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota. In many ways, the book is enriched by Wise’s extensive scholarship into politics, economics, ethology and indigenous peoples’ history. However, the book suffers from unnecessarily stilted language and sometimes awkward attempts to force historical events and activities to fit into the intellectual paradigm that Wise has posited. As a result, all too frequently the book reads like a polemic.
The text is relatively short; notes, references and an index comprise fully a quarter of the 184-page volume. Following a general introduction, Wise presents five chapters, each exploring a different facet of the reorientation of the colonial labor system on the Northern Plains from predation to production. The first chapter explores the importance of the whiskey trade in early settlers’ efforts to control the so-called “Whoop-Up Country” during the 1860s and 1870s. The trade emboldened the Blackfeet Indians’ resistance to colonization and counterintuitively enhanced wolf populations by creating a surfeit of bison carcasses through Blackfeet market hunting. The second chapter builds on the first, examining the transformation of lethal wolf control strategies. Beginning with the industrial trade in wolf skins in 1860, Wise traces the evolution of wolfing through the 1920s as wolfers became more professionalized but also increasingly marginalized by the livestock industry and by state and provincial bounty systems.
With bison largely extirpated from the northern Great Plains by the early 1880s, the indigenous Blackfeet began to starve and were forced to consider their options for survival. In chapters three and four, Wise examines how the United States’ Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) attempted to “colonize the Blackfeet through their stomachs” by forcing them to become cattle ranchers. This transition from a semi-nomadic predatory existence to a settled productive lifestyle proved to be a difficult undertaking because the Blackfeet continued their old traditions of obtaining meat through hunting, but they substituted cattle for bison, which thoroughly disgusted settlers. The OIA built two slaughterhouses on the Blackfeet Reservation in an attempt to coerce the Indians into making “clean” meat. Faced with starvation, the Blackfeet reluctantly assented to killing and butchering cattle at the abattoirs. In another effort to make the Blackfeet more productive and dependent on agriculture, the reservation was divided into allotments, a process completed in 1912. Each reservation resident was given an allotment. The Blackfeet eventually restructured their food system by establishing the Piegan Farming and Livestock Association (PFLA) in 1921, a collection of 29 Blackfeet-led farming districts organized around the cooperative use of individual land allotments. By the end of its second year, the PFLA produced enough food to feed the entire reservation’s population, which only a few years before was on the brink of starvation.
The final chapter recounts the establishment of reserves in 1909 to restore bison and pronghorn to the prairies through the creation of the Montana National Bison Range and the Wainwright Buffalo National Park in Alberta (now closed, delisted and incorporated into a Canadian military installation). Because of low population density on the Blackfeet Reservation, not all of the land allotments had been distributed to residents and so were considered surplus. Ironically, the OIA sold the surplus allotments to conservation interests on the East Coast to create the Montana National Bison Range on former reservation land. This further reduced the Blackfeet’s land base and made the Indians increasingly dependent on domestic agriculture and government subsidies.
Wise begins the individual chapters with introductory comments that place the topic at hand within the structural framework of his overall argument. He then presents detailed historical information garnered from his research. He ends each chapter with a conclusion that aligns the historical events with the book’s thesis. The introductory and concluding sections can be stiff, didactic and repetitive, but the historical information contained in the body of each chapter makes for fascinating and engaging reading.
Wise ends the book with a conclusion that seems oddly dissociated from the foregoing text. While concentrating so doggedly on his thesis of productive activities supplanting predatory activities in the subjugation of the northern plains, the conclusion instead focuses largely on the human relationship with gray wolves in light of biological insights gleaned over the last century. To summarize only one aspect of the multifaceted analysis that preceded it seems shortsighted, although, to be honest, Wise certainly has made his overarching thesis abundantly clear long before the end of the book.
Wise’s account gives a good overview of the European-American settlement of the northern Great Plains and the subjugation of the indigenous human inhabitants and their cultures, the loss of native fauna, and the conversion of the prairie ecosystem to agriculture. As such, the book likely will be of interest to cultural historians as well as predator biologists and landscape ecologists interested in developing a perspective on historical changes in regional ecosystems.
As he explains in his acknowledgements in the preface, Wise initially conceived of this book at an environmental history workshop jointly sponsored by Montana State University and the University of Wisconsin in 2007. Wise went on to develop the concept into his doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota. In many ways, the book is enriched by Wise’s extensive scholarship into politics, economics, ethology and indigenous peoples’ history. However, the book suffers from unnecessarily stilted language and sometimes awkward attempts to force historical events and activities to fit into the intellectual paradigm that Wise has posited. As a result, all too frequently the book reads like a polemic.
The text is relatively short; notes, references and an index comprise fully a quarter of the 184-page volume. Following a general introduction, Wise presents five chapters, each exploring a different facet of the reorientation of the colonial labor system on the Northern Plains from predation to production. The first chapter explores the importance of the whiskey trade in early settlers’ efforts to control the so-called “Whoop-Up Country” during the 1860s and 1870s. The trade emboldened the Blackfeet Indians’ resistance to colonization and counterintuitively enhanced wolf populations by creating a surfeit of bison carcasses through Blackfeet market hunting. The second chapter builds on the first, examining the transformation of lethal wolf control strategies. Beginning with the industrial trade in wolf skins in 1860, Wise traces the evolution of wolfing through the 1920s as wolfers became more professionalized but also increasingly marginalized by the livestock industry and by state and provincial bounty systems.
With bison largely extirpated from the northern Great Plains by the early 1880s, the indigenous Blackfeet began to starve and were forced to consider their options for survival. In chapters three and four, Wise examines how the United States’ Office of Indian Affairs (OIA) attempted to “colonize the Blackfeet through their stomachs” by forcing them to become cattle ranchers. This transition from a semi-nomadic predatory existence to a settled productive lifestyle proved to be a difficult undertaking because the Blackfeet continued their old traditions of obtaining meat through hunting, but they substituted cattle for bison, which thoroughly disgusted settlers. The OIA built two slaughterhouses on the Blackfeet Reservation in an attempt to coerce the Indians into making “clean” meat. Faced with starvation, the Blackfeet reluctantly assented to killing and butchering cattle at the abattoirs. In another effort to make the Blackfeet more productive and dependent on agriculture, the reservation was divided into allotments, a process completed in 1912. Each reservation resident was given an allotment. The Blackfeet eventually restructured their food system by establishing the Piegan Farming and Livestock Association (PFLA) in 1921, a collection of 29 Blackfeet-led farming districts organized around the cooperative use of individual land allotments. By the end of its second year, the PFLA produced enough food to feed the entire reservation’s population, which only a few years before was on the brink of starvation.
The final chapter recounts the establishment of reserves in 1909 to restore bison and pronghorn to the prairies through the creation of the Montana National Bison Range and the Wainwright Buffalo National Park in Alberta (now closed, delisted and incorporated into a Canadian military installation). Because of low population density on the Blackfeet Reservation, not all of the land allotments had been distributed to residents and so were considered surplus. Ironically, the OIA sold the surplus allotments to conservation interests on the East Coast to create the Montana National Bison Range on former reservation land. This further reduced the Blackfeet’s land base and made the Indians increasingly dependent on domestic agriculture and government subsidies.
Wise begins the individual chapters with introductory comments that place the topic at hand within the structural framework of his overall argument. He then presents detailed historical information garnered from his research. He ends each chapter with a conclusion that aligns the historical events with the book’s thesis. The introductory and concluding sections can be stiff, didactic and repetitive, but the historical information contained in the body of each chapter makes for fascinating and engaging reading.
Wise ends the book with a conclusion that seems oddly dissociated from the foregoing text. While concentrating so doggedly on his thesis of productive activities supplanting predatory activities in the subjugation of the northern plains, the conclusion instead focuses largely on the human relationship with gray wolves in light of biological insights gleaned over the last century. To summarize only one aspect of the multifaceted analysis that preceded it seems shortsighted, although, to be honest, Wise certainly has made his overarching thesis abundantly clear long before the end of the book.
Wise’s account gives a good overview of the European-American settlement of the northern Great Plains and the subjugation of the indigenous human inhabitants and their cultures, the loss of native fauna, and the conversion of the prairie ecosystem to agriculture. As such, the book likely will be of interest to cultural historians as well as predator biologists and landscape ecologists interested in developing a perspective on historical changes in regional ecosystems.
March 17, 2020
Book emphasizing the government's agenda of destroying predators (mostly wolves) and it's process of transforming native American way of living into an agriculture one. It was truly intriguing to realize how much of a role the government played in controlling the way north american society was through its vision for it.
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