Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon

This book challenges this conventional wisdom that land claims and co-management – two of the most visible and celebrated elements of this restructuring the relationship between Aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state – will help reverse centuries of inequity. Based on three years of ethnographic research in the Yukon, the author examines the complex relationship between the people of Kluane First Nation, the land and animals, and the state. This book moves beyond conventional models of colonialism, in which the state is treated as a monolithic entity, and instead explores how “state power” is reproduced through everyday bureaucratic practices – including struggles over the production and use of knowledge.

Paul Nadasdy is an associate professor of anthropology at Cornell University.